When history repeats itself, it’s usually not so quickly. During the lead up to the primary election, students at Western Carolina University, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and University of North Carolina-Greensboro raised alarms about the exclusion of campus early voting sites from county plans.
At WCU, it was a break from longstanding tradition. NC A&T and UNCG hadn’t hosted midterm primary early voting sites before, but their campuses had been used for presidential primary and general elections.
The College Democrats of North Carolina and several students sued, arguing that removing or rejecting campus early voting sites discriminated against younger voters by enacting high barriers to the right to vote.
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While US District Court Judge William Osteen dismissed the case just days before early voting began in February, he may experience a bit of déjà vu this fall.
By July 24, all county election boards must submit their early voting plans to the State Board of Elections, including the number of voting sites, their locations and hours. If county board members all agree, then their plan is good to go. But if just one member objects, the plan goes to the state to make the final decision sometime in August.
The State Board can choose the majority plan, minority plan or a plan of their own invention. Depending on their decision, they may find themselves in another courtroom this fall.
Jackson County voting sites
While North Carolina students lost their court case in February, they hoped it would put pressure on county election boards to make a different decision in the general election.
The strategy worked, sort of, Western Carolina University political science professor Chris Cooper said.
In Jackson County’s primary election, the three Republican board members voted against the WCU central campus site in favor of the Cullowhee Recreation Center. But this time around, the decision on voting sites wasn’t along party lines.
Republican member Wes Hanemayer resigned before the vote in protest, and Republican Jay Pavey voted with the board’s two Democrats in favor of the new WCU campus site, at the Health and Human Services building. Republican chair Bill Thompson was the lone holdout. Even though the majority shifted, it was not a unanimous decision, so the State Board will still have the final say.
The discussion touched on parking and accessibility considerations. The proposed voting site is on the upper level of a multi-level building, so getting there could be confusing and difficult for some, Thompson said.
Board Democrat Roy Osborn countered that a memorandum of understanding between WCU and the board resolved all the issues. The MOU, obtained by Carolina Public Press, would require the university to provide 20 designated voter parking spaces on the same level of the proposed voting enclosure, prominent parking lot signage and an electronic highway sign directing voter traffic and enough space for political parties to display campaign materials and voter info outside the buffer zone, all for free.
On the other hand, students without vehicles would have a difficult time walking the two miles to the community recreation center, board Democrat Betsy Smith said. The university shuttle has regular stops at the HHS building, but not the recreation center. During the primary, WCU switched its shuttle schedule to run to the recreation center twice an hour, according to university spokesperson Julia Duvall.
“We will continue to monitor the situation and develop appropriate transportation options for students once the decision has been finalized,” she said.
The recreation center also has a smaller voting enclosure and no designated voter parking, Pavey said.
Pavey and Thompson were not coy about the pressure campaign surrounding the vote.
“I know that I’m bucking my party by this, and I may very well be a one-term person on the board of elections, but if that’s it, that’s fine,” Pavey said before voting. “I will stand on this hill, and I will die on this hill from my perspective of integrity, and I just believe that this is the place that we should have it, and I’m not going to let people tell me and threaten me about what they may or may not do as far as my tenure on this board.”
Pavey and Thompson referred to pressure from “Raleigh,” which Thompson later said was from people at both the State Board of Elections and the auditor’s office.
“I’ve kind of given them my word,” Thompson said.
State Board spokesperson Jason Tyson said nobody on the State Board or its staff discussed the voting sites decision with anyone in Jackson County, and that the board members mistakenly thought the person they spoke to was a State Board employee.
Thompson and Pavey did not respond to requests for comment. Hanemeyer could not be reached.
Auditor’s office spokesperson Randy Brechbiel said their office has regular communication with local board chairs.
“There has been concern expressed over the elimination of the rec center site, which has been used for nearly 20 years, and has been one of the most utilized sites in the county,” Brechbiel said in a statement. “Ultimately, these decisions are made by local boards and the State Board.”
The auditor appoints State Board members and county election board chairs, after a 2024 law change, but his role is limited, mostly to budgetary oversight. The State Board and county boards are otherwise independent. But since the transition, some see the auditor’s office as blurring the lines between oversight and control.
Pavey said he and Hanemeyer were asked to justify their votes to the Republican Party executive committee, but their arguments fell on deaf ears.
“We presented them evidence, we presented them numbers, we presented them everything, and all I heard was, ‘Well, we just don’t want it on campus,’” Pavey said.
Thompson said the party had concerns about “neutrality,” but he didn’t see it as a “real problem” in Jackson County. Cooper’s research found that the majority of WCU voters are registered unaffiliated, and that since 2016, when the site was added, the county overall has moved to the right.
“Now they didn’t do better because of the new site, but I think we can say with certainty that the new site did not cause the county to become more liberal,” Cooper said.
The pressure wasn’t one-sided, Thompson said. The plaintiffs in the primary court case were represented by Elias Law Firm, established by Marc Elias, a well-known Democratic Party attorney.
“There’s a big push to have it on campus whenever you get sued by one of the largest Democrat lawyers in the country, Marc Elias,” Thompson said. “There’s big money behind this. There’s major powers behind this. I don’t like being where I’m sitting.”
If the State Board wants to avoid another lawsuit, their best bet is to approve the plan Jackson used from 2016 to 2020, which included two Cullowhee sites — at both WCU and the recreation center, Cooper said.
Guilford County voting
The Guilford County Board of Elections will vote on its early voting plan in the coming weeks, and it’s expected to be a repeat, too, Democratic board member Carolyn Bunker said. She anticipates the Republican majority will opt for its 2022 midterm election plan, which did not include any campus voting sites. If so, she plans to vote against that and present a plan with NC A&T and UNCG sites.
The county, and Greensboro and High Point in particular, are growing, Bunker said. Students have shown greater engagement, and she wants them to have every opportunity to build a voting habit.
Neither university has hosted early voting during non-presidential years.
“(The Republican majority’s) argument is that we don’t usually have these sites during midterms, but 10 years ago, 20 years ago, we didn’t have a lot of these sites, and we’ve added to them as they’ve been needed and asked for,” Bunker said.
During court proceedings, Judge Osteen noted the lack of precedent as a mark against the students’ argument for early voting sites. He was not convinced that students’ right to vote was violated by the exclusion of a campus site if they never had one to begin with. However, the judge said he might feel differently if it were a presidential election.
Between their personal funds, nonprofit partnerships and community donations, Shia Rozier and Terrence Olu Rouse spent upwards of $10,000 to bus NC A&T voters to the polls in February. While juggling their responsibilities as students themselves, the pair launched Protect Ours, a movement to provide transportation when the election boards and the court declined to provide a campus early voting site.
Rozier said the bus cost about $1,500 a day to run back and forth from campus to the Ag Center from noon to 7 p.m.
“We were lucky enough that the community support really helped carry A&T through the entire early voting period, but it was quite an enormous financial lift from the fundraisers and to nonprofit partnerships that we have,” Rozier said.
Ever since January, NC A&T students have been at every Guilford County election board meeting. Rozier and Rouse have attempted to get a private meeting with the Republican board members on multiple occasions to pitch their case for the general election, without success.
The next meeting will be the second with public comment this year, which is progress, Rozier said. But it’s still hard to have hope that this cycle will be any different, she said.
“It’s very unfortunate that we keep having to go to these lengths of being seen as their adversaries rather than their constituents, and keep having to meet in these protests and things like that, instead of being able to actually have civil dialogue,” Rozier said.
Republican board chair Eugene Lester did not respond to a request for comment about the voting sites.
During his testimony to the State Board in January, Lester said he didn’t agree that transportation is an issue for students.
“We’re certainly not going to look at one group and say … that group is more important than any other group,” he said. “Every citizen ought to have a right to vote. They have that opportunity to take advantage of it.”
If there are no campus early voting sites, Rozier said their first step would be to talk to their nonprofit partners and see what they can do to help with transportation before they ask individuals to donate again. It’s all still up in the air, though.
Voting sites in Wake County
In Wake County, county election board monitors are worried that the usual North Carolina State University early voting site at the centrally located Talley Student Center could be abandoned for another, less-accessible site on the outskirts of campus.
Wake County Democrat Gerry Cohen said no decisions have been made, but there’s been discussion about the voting sites.
While the student center has about 77 parking spaces, compared to the alternate Business Services Center site, which has more than 100, the student center’s voter enclosure is double the size and more accessible to students living on campus, Cohen said.
The last time the business services center was used as a site was in 2016, and Cohen remembers “very, very long lines.”
He thinks the parking debate is irrelevant for campus early voting sites. Most students either already have their car parked elsewhere on campus or don’t have transportation.
“If you don’t want to park on campus, there are 17 other places you could drive to,” he said. “No one is forcing anybody to drive on campus.”
The Wake County elections board will vote on their early voting plan June 12.
Columbus County sites
In a recent Columbus County election board meeting, Republican board chair Jillian McPherson-Edge suggested eliminating four out of the county’s five typical early voting sites.
McPherson-Edge said that decision would be the best use of taxpayer dollars. It costs about $4,500 for each early voting site, she said. County commissioners’ budget allows for five sites.
“What we can see is that the cost for early voting is continuing to rise, and I think we can tell that the voter participation is becoming clear: we don’t have the voter participation in this county that warrants five sites for early voting,” she said.
Instead of spreading election staff across five sites, they could consolidate resources and personnel to be more efficient.
Democratic member Jeffery Register questioned the plan. He said it wouldn’t be adequate for people with transportation issues or disabilities.
As one of the largest counties in area in North Carolina, it’s particularly troublesome to have just one early voting site in Columbus County, said Hilary Klein, Southern Coalition for Social Justice senior voting rights counsel, in a letter to the county board.
Voters will expect options: especially the majority of early voters who used sites other than the county elections board office in 2022 and 2024, she added.
Would a new lawsuit fare better?
The original lawsuit over voting sites failed for several reasons.
First, it was too close to the start of early voting to change anything, Judge Osteen ruled. This cycle could be different. The State Board will make final early voting decisions in August, and early voting begins October 15. That could be enough of a runway for a judge to make a different determination.
Osteen was also concerned about ordering a college to open an early voting site without knowing whether the space was still available. To counter this issue, WCU drafted a MOU with the county board declaring its intention to have the HHS building space available for all elections for the next decade.
WCU would likely have a better shot of success than UNCG or NC A&T, based on the ruling. Without a history of midterm early voting sites, Osteen seemed skeptical that there were any voting rights to violate.
Finally, Osteen determined that the county and state election boards’ interests in being efficient and managing costs and logistical burdens outweighed any burden on students’ voting rights. For any lawsuit to succeed, the math or the judge’s mind would have to change.
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